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croft was up there somewhere.
Up there
is hundreds of square miles.
    ‘More than enough. I’m pumping out the basement. Again.’
    The cop looks up to the sky, chuckling at the dark rolling clouds. ‘Well, good luck with that one. There’s no end to this rain, you know.’
    ‘Tell me about it.’ Eric waves and attempts a U-turn. The Land Rover takes a few goes at it, back and forth as the turning circle is so poor. We drive off in silence. He’s a man of few words at the best of times.
    I like that about Eric. Even when Sophie and I were kids and he was in his late teens he kept himself to himself. He was born in the house next door to ours and stayed there after his mum died, even after his wife left him. Eric is nothing like his mother: he is large and lumbering; she was small and powerful, a nippy wee bird of a woman. Eric worshipped her. He was a mummy’s boy. He wouldn’t have survived if he wasn’t. Once she died he tried being married, but it didn’t last long, and once his wife Magda had scarpered he started spending more time at the croft and neglecting the house in Eaglesham. Rod casually mentions the state of the house next door every time they meet as he believes it will eventually affect the resale value of ours, and in Rod’s eyes that is a hanging offence. I used to think that was strange for an architect, letting a house go to ruin, but Eric is also an artist. He is great at designing buildings and rubbish at maintaining them. I understand that. I like diagnosing illness in patients, I like the puzzle, but anything beyond that is tedious.
    Once we’re on the straight road I feel Eric relax. Sophie would want me to make small talk, so I have a go. I need to think about it so I turn in my seat to rearrange some boxes of groceries that have worked free from their restraining straps and are rattling against each other.
    ‘So you were up at the croft?’ I try as an opener.
    ‘Yes.’ He adjusts the sound on the CD. It is something Gaelic-y, a soulful fiddle with a breathy female vocal drifting above the engine noise, ghostly music on a night for long-lost souls.
    It makes me think of Magda, the beautiful woman who ran off with another man and caused a scandal. Sophie might have nicked her hairstyle but as people they were miles apart. Soph was full of life and laughter whereas Magda was silent and aloof. But they have both gone. Maybe that’s why Eric has shown such empathy in the last few months. I am only here because Rod and Eric had a chat over the garden fence about getting me away from all this stress. It was obvious to both of them that I was not well, not coping, not sleeping. Even before Soph went missing, I was losing concentration at uni and my running was becoming obsessive. They were worried about me, having witnessed Grant’s slow mental decline, and were scared the same thing was happening to me. They should have been worried about Sophie.
    In April Eric had said his boss was looking for someone to spend the summer at his new house at Ardno with his wife. Someone responsible and young. When Rod spoke to me about it, my first instinct had been to laugh. Why would I want to babysit a spoiled bitch of a woman old enough to be my mother? Then he said that she lived in the middle of nowhere and I thought – why not? It was a great excuse to stay out of the house until Sophie came back. And I could do some real running.
    Eric changes gear and watches the road ahead intently. The deer are moving down from the hills, he explains, driven down by the rain. He seems happy chatting to me in a way he never was talking to Sophie. Maybe because she spent her life teasing him in that way pretty women can. When Magda left, Sophie said that she was probably stuck in the attic somewhere, tied to the bedstead, screaming in the night to get free. I’m not sure she was joking. Mum’s only comment to that was that she was surprised the marriage had lasted so long, Eric being about as attractive as old